Sky Saw Read online

  “Blake Butler, mastermind and visionary, has sneaked up and drugged the American novel. What stumbles awake in the aftermath is feral and awesome in its power, a fairy tale of an ordinary family subjected to the strange, lonesome agony known as daily life. There Is No Year is a merciless novel cleansed of joy, pumped full of fear and awe.”

  —Ben Marcus

  “If there’s a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new writer than Blake Butler, . . . well, there just isn’t. I’ve literally lost sleep imagining the fallout when There Is No Year drops and American fiction shifts its axis.”

  —Dennis Cooper

  “Blake Butler is a daring invigorator of the literary sentence.”

  —Gary Lutz

  PRAISE FOR NOTHING

  “The klieg-light intensity of Butler’s writing intimates that there is something fundamentally terrifying about what each of us does every single night, which is to pitch our minds and bodies into oblivion.”

  —Time

  “The primary effect of sentences like these is a powerful immersion. Reading them, we are running “Blake Butler” as a kind of executable software program in the hardware of our heads.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Think David Lynch. In the waking dreamscape where Butler’s thoughts spin out of control, he could be De Quincy’s opium-eater wandering through a Dali painting by way of a poem by Antonin Artaud.”

  —Atlanta Journal & Constitution

  “…a disorienting, fractal-edged portal into [Butler’s] increasingly elastic perception of consciousness, space-time, and metabolism.”

  —The Onion A/V Club

  “There are some cues from the sprawling internal monologues of Nicholson Baker and the genre-defying non-fiction of William T. Vollmann in this expansive exploration of sleeplessness, but Butler is a writer unto himself. Simply put, you haven’t ever read a book like Nothing before. It’ll keep you up at night”

  —Creative Loafing Atlanta

  “Lyrical…A weird, waking-dream of a memoir superbly illustrating the relentless inner spin of the insomniac.”

  —Kirkus

  PRAISE FOR THERE IS NO YEAR

  “[There Is No Year] is a thing of such strange beauty that digging for answers of your own will yield the rewards that only well-made art can provide.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “There is no novel like Blake Butler’s There Is No Year. . . . Unexpectedly riveting, totally original, and frequently funny.”

  —Denver Post

  “Calling Blake Butler’s There Is No Year a novel is akin to calling René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images a pipe; both works subtly expand the framework of their respective disciplines by challenging an audience that has solidified its expectations after centuries of familiarity and repetition.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Dystopian and sinister.”

  —Nylon

  “An endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A smoke signal on the horizon of the American literary landscape. . . . [As] if Gertrude Stein wrote the script for a Kenneth Anger film set inside of a Norman Rockwell painting to be produced for YouTube with a John Cage soundtrack. . . . [Butler’s prose offers] ecstatic pleasures. . . . it bursts and cracks with inventions and constructions.”

  —Creative Loafing

  “This artfully crafted, stunning piece of nontraditional literature is recommended for contemporary literature fans looking for something out of the ordinary. Recommended for students of literature, psychology, and philosophy, as the distinctive writing style and creative insight into the minds of one family deserve analysis.”

  —Library Journal

  SKY SAW

  Tyrant Books

  676A 9th Ave. #153

  New York, New York 10036

  www.nytyrantbooks.com

  Copyright © 2012 Blake Butler

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 13: 978-0-9885183-1-5

  Cover and book design by Adam Robinson

  Cover illustration by Truett Dietz

  This is a work of fiction and all the characters, organizations, and events within it are from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  SKY SAW

  BLK BTLR

  Tyrant Books

  New York City 2012

  For GianCarlo

  Content

  Sky Saw

  I will pray

  I will pray

  I will go down low

  And I will pray to you

  Down as low as I can go

  I will go there

  And I will pray to you

  – Michael Gira, “Sex, God, Sex”

  Now

  White cone descended in sound blister

  There were the people having skin removed: to make the hood over our last evening

  Cone, White cone, colored destroyed, slipped between the wall air and the bodice of the sacrificial mothers making money from the rummage of their wombs, unto the cone

  Our homes turned on their sides, the sound of the descent fixed with the ripping split the image of our vision into ten and ten again, we watched the fluelight strobe from softer planets in the vision of the fly, our begging formed a prayer

  The cue meat of our perfect flayed-red bodies had been for hours there arranged, stood up on gray dots in White silence for the cone, we called it god, we called our bleating mothers named into the fold of needless seeing, this could have ended where it began, could have spared the retch of splitting selves, where the anger of the firmament released a golding dew

  In the patterns of the people I could see the homes bumping through the frame of dirt rising magnetized to match the cone, the other color was a skin box inscribed with the numbers of our names, and someone begging inside the begging to be released from infinite fits, as this could yes go on forever and this would yes go on, numbers remained, sod remained fit to our cerebrums where we touched inside the fold, becoming only ever one mass body, the blubber of metal lungs and unending crystal squeal

  Under the sever of the folds of each skin there were mirrors being turned up toward the gold, to fix the light back at itself and in beam of it the air began to mold white and formed with cones along the bristle, there were corridors there eaten into nothing, there were the blind becoming tongues, crumpled hard under a coarse hold where no one wanted and the sandwiches were worm, the fire leading backwards into long globes where the holes would let you fall forever among dough, the cribbing of the muscles, the asking of the child, how to as well exit this wrecked body before it hits the ground under the ground, and under that, the chew

  Now our unraveling for evenings and the columns of the replicating bell, a cord of child milk rising in pink glisten for the city lamp and making every person see themselves before themselves with tubes removed, the index of the body bopped with big sheaths of silver foiling, catching words where there were words, though there were very few, the colds came rolling, cinder burst in spume, chocolate winter, no condition, a bottle of the night, the words went on and on repeating in no hours crammed between, the crust eroding on the clocks, rams the size of nowhere folding through the granule of the teeth, where anyone had been bitten for any year at all, I did not know what to say, I did not know what to say or could be needed, the hammer of the grunt, pig babies falling out of holes surrounding, wired, what I needed was this flesh

  No, what I’d needed was not anything about a body, it was a small leak over the house, where all these animals were writhing and making little purple pockets from their sweat, by which hand over hand for hours one might climb into a blue mark that had corroded just across the gray, the mink of all the skies folded to one sky again quilted in
the money of our night, a face just behind it, I heard seething, with its flabby lips and neon teeth, speaking into our white cylindrical air with all the language to be given back to zip, back to the mime behind the moon’s boob squirting ugly milk all in this life, and still no one here would stop me from Become, no one could gather at my knees, the gnats having strengthened all such bulbs around us that the speaking even would not fit, and nothing left and wives dividing, and the money in my snatch, for every hour of the day a bed bloated stone-sized on the face of waters that had risen over all old glow, all the powerwires farting bloating pellets

  There must be a limit to this wall, there must be someone growing larger just beneath the growing larger that could fuck the force back toward a stall, this was the idea we were healing under in a lexicon of domes, not a sound now even ever but something running back and forth between two nodes, and peeling upward anything that wanted near it, the mothers’ laughing rendered paste, the oars of something harder than a houseface leaning down toward the soil and blistering within it something reticulated and caterpillared and so croned it could not speak, the piddle of the image wavering from great heat and spittle rising off my back, my ingrate body, my pustule system, there was no one I would not have ever left, there were so many sore beds I had turned from or fell down through and would never blink again, would never eat again, would never, and I did this every day, for every hour I was alive I ratted someone out and so did John, Mary, Mom, and so on, all the prior unnumbered names, all the flux stops and the white ones, creaming underneath, the rise of corn where that bunch hit it and something warbling for bust, to be hit hard in the center of its legendary face, the creams and rouge of Endlesswanting amassing on our arms a finer glue

  And still I could not stand beside you in the color of the cone, for each inch of me that wanted and would be cleaning there was ten feet of me that stunk, each rung of each of these connected more rungs in a cribbage system I could by no length of me infer, I did not have the body, no mind, nothing left on which to brand, suddenly I was wearing all these bracelets and these groancrowns and I was looking down upon the earth, the legions of pixel bodies screaming underneath me and raising with their hands, the curdlife in their eyes forming diagonals that split each into new soil, blood encrusted, cowing, bigger babies squirming in their tendons to get out of their whole heads and making war from underneath, bruises formed in trombone to regale me with acid squench, and yet, there at the same time, up above me, I was looking on into the butt of any other one, my arms raised in the same way up above my head and beeping with the babies also in my own folds there again, and the lather pouring from my bodice and the keyholes of my spine, and for every lick of shoulder I had there there were ten others with the same whorl, all of us looking up and onward into one, whereby, in the split, I was the godhead and the altar and the putty and the butt, I was no one for anybody and the whole air and the figurefather and the wretch, and all of this was fine still and all of this would soon I knew begin again

  It did not begin again, I waited, I said the word, I fucked the Cone, I let the Cone fuck hard into my hole, I waited, it did not begin again, I said the word again, I fucked the Cone harder, I squirted come into a sound, something wriggled through my system eating all need and the need made meat in me again, and yet the hour went on lurking and still would not again begin again, I waited, I said the word, I let the Cone have all my breast, I gave my cunt my comb my belly my cerebrum my disguise, no word, I gave my ass my hair my money gave the center of my light and all their coil, gave up the years I had recovered in my pillage and what glue where I soon expected life again, gave all of that to that above me and at the same time rained it down, a liquid system of my spoiling rendered overhead coming down on the clean soil, I waited more and fucked the Cone more and fucked the Cone’s friends and its clime, I rolled into it and gave over the numbers I had been keeping for better night, to index in and sit with all these hours, I gave it this and this again, I let it eat its dinner in my tonsils, I let it sell me to the digit, gave my last religion to its mother in the dark, could not stop coughing, wore the gown, split the crown in ten and ate that, shat it out, gave this to there, the Cone, the Whitened cone of Now, my lord, it would not listen, it did not begin again, it had no eyes inside it even with my body bent and taking all this passion up the ass, all this spooling in me where once I had meant to be a seamstress and now was nothing more than stone

  You could ask again, you could keep going, there were two dimensions and no walk, there were the seven dens split into heavens each and someone presiding over all, a glove eye at the center of Now, it said its name and was the name forever and would spin down under dirt and eat the cord out of the dirt if this was wanted and would return and be a floor or be a cut orange on some white table seated around by many hooded men in masks, one of them a woman with a shaved head, though she would not be found, and burned on each one’s left nipple one new number that had been unindexed from the charts, a glass of milk in one hand, hammer other, how to remember how to begin, how to call the number of my name into the phone that has been baking since the minute of the lock, where you were born a second child beside yourself into this white cone and the cone again, the mother of you bathing in the sludge you’d shit out of you inside a night, upon a bed called before another frame you’d meant to love and could not see, could not call by the right name in the light there with the screens descending every second made of ash, blistering the second soft between you and obliterating and descending every second there again, it did not matter that the sky had lurched down all this give already and within that some kind of sponge, a new shirt to put on and walk around in, cloud speech, this would not be yours, this would not be hours to have given back into you no matter which way inside the folding you would try, where in a warm flat room you laid down and were someone and in other ways you’d just begun, in the same ways you’d been folded upright in a white cord for the hours colded in the floor, and in the same ways you were nothing left regardless and would never sin again, would never lick again or say a number or be a body of the Crash of Now, the tone unspooling from its tip ten ways and ten again

  What not yet above could not be crushed, this was the fifteenth iteration and would replicate beyond, though this still not be any new beginning and when it ended it would not end, the houses laced with blue night risen in the toning of the crystalmind, a corridor of small flags each pyramidal and seated with a center made of cream, each hiding where inside them another instance of this lock, the speaking humming through the speakerbodies magicked and lumped with lanterns down the longest corridors, the Cone’s, the Cone curled queuing flues of more natural numbers with each one a little flay, guns pirouetting in the cinder, honey for a clasp, inside the bark I tried to stand up and look what fell out but all this paste I can not eat, this translucent shit of coming skin, or a person rendered from dismissal, what I gurgled, where you’ve been, the scorched recorder on the bedside table I would from my mind to mattress groan a blow, notes for nothing, no words, you feet beside my pillow squirting bread, somewhere down a long a long curve way beneath us a crying chowder we carried in our lungs throughout the maze of days and frottage dying in the drawers surrounding hours we could not sleep, the hole the sink makes in a person, the diagrams of chalk, let me have you, again, no prismatics, let me have you of your brine, let me let the Cone inside us and fold nothing and be nothing and what worship of the rise, worms not threads but pleasure showers, the hole I have for you alone, the walls collapsing in the headnod faction where the mirrorarmies ask us to refrain from being flesh and spittle, I put my head against you in the shower, there is a number, a kind of dynasty undid, something writhing underneath the lather, your name imprinted, your chestparts affixed in the acid of the lawn we do not have, the asphalt prison of white hours walking between engines, someone halving you from inside that machine, the blue machine I almost killed by dying, the words you could not count, glass emission, night of no breech, caught you
r head against the blurt, and in the white the White Cone again rises, again the pearling rounding down, where I walk into the no yard where no door is and see the stone cut into the next instance in relief, another number will be coming and yet will not appear, speak me your age, add into the silent number that one and throw the system, guide

  The shrieking sound came through the ceiling. Person 1180 felt her skin go limp. Fat powder fell around her on the blond wood—powder of bodies, burst into the air from somewhere else, their hair and syllables all knitted up in the meat of what she inhaled, and in the linings of her thinking. Beyond the house, she heard the fry of insect legs in time, long needles wanting at her flesh. All the light was full of perforation.

  Person 1180 had the child spread on the table. His newborn eyes sometimes changed color. They would be dark green like the father’s, then next blink they matched the wall. Sometimes the whites went checkerboard or spiraled—sometimes the pupils were not there. Person 2030 had come out twenty pounds. Person 1180 had a limp she blamed on jogging and a scar she blamed on God.

  The shrieking warbled at the window. The glass bent but did not break. The child began to leak black liquid as his ass raised off the table.

  The tone had been appearing on the air for weeks. Its tone contained all possible timbre: every sentence ever crammed into each blink. Sometimes the tone would last for several hours, sealing the air against all other motion. It always hurt. It made Person 1180’s blood go numb. It made the books fall off the bookshelves and land opened to certain pages, though when she tried to look the words would melt or disappear. No one could say what made the tone or where it came from. Tax dollars were purportedly at work.